The antagonistic relationship between the FZ and its star writer is one of the burdens of this correspondence. Lines of command at the paper were, to say the least, fuzzy. There was an editorial committee — hence the extraordinary proliferation of newspapermen’s names in some of these letters (a history of The New Yorker would be no different, of course). Design, personnel, allegiances, politics, finance, all underwent continual change. Hence one’s sense of Roth’s at times loitering unhappily and unproductively around the head office in Frankfurt — he was watching his own back. Hence, too, his adoption of the slightly younger Brentano — it was so that he too might have someone to command, to patronize, to induct into mysteries, and to lead into battle. From these letters, one feels that there was any number of chiefs at the Frankfurter, and Roth their only Indian. It was a remarkable paper, distinguished, even unrivaled, in its roster of writers, among them Walter Benjamin — but it also had a powerful (and to Roth, never that much of a team player, rather nauseating) sense of its own distinguished remarkability. Newly arrived in Paris, or in Russia, out of sight of it, he still had some interest in its affairs, and wrote painstaking critiques and — practically! — memos to senior colleagues. A few years later, he had none. In 1931, he wrote to Friedrich Traugott Gubler, Reifenberg’s successor as feuilleton editor, “It’s just a paper, only slightly better than the others in Germany. It’s no longer absolutely good or essential. And neither you nor Reifenberg nor Picard will be able to fix it. You will sacrifice your personal lives, the only important thing.” And this is what he then, rather movingly, goes on to prescribe: “Always do what your wife says, spend time with her and the children, discuss everything with her, and don’t do anything just because your obstinate man’s head tells you to.” The Frankfurter’s sense of exceptionalism — one might almost call it “manifest destiny”—mixed, of course, with relativism, kept it going, trimming as it went, through ten years of the Third Reich, until it was finally closed down in August 1943. Like some of his colleagues, Reifenberg, who stayed at the paper throughout, and was involved in its next incarnation as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of today, was persuaded that they had managed to keep up some coded, clandestine resistance to the Nazis in their columns. Looking at some contributions with a view to putting together an anthology of them in the 1950s, he was forced to realize there was no resistance in any meaningful sense, not that any reader would have understood. The newspaper was trapped in a vainglorious bubble of its own making; and Roth, who after 1933 would have nothing to do with it, and broke off all relations with colleagues still there, was tacitly and belatedly vindicated in his intransigence.
It was in France, you could say, that Roth learned to fear and hate and see Germany as it was. The specimens of German-ness that fetched up in Paris — the Prussians he thought of as boches—and penitential return visits to Frankfurt or Berlin taught him a sort of visionary anthropology. Once Paris was denied him, and he had been to Russia, and a further visit there failed to come off, the FZ had only Germany and Germany and more Germany to offer him, and Roth’s responses became swifter, more virulent, more instinctive, and less patient. His eye was trained by the health, glamour, and nature of a sort of anticipatory self-exile in France. Germany, by contrast, was a disfigurement, a freak show, a deeply sick patient:
I feel Germany right off the bat, and all of it at once. Every street corner expresses the awfulness of the whole country. It has the ugliest prostitutes, the girls indistinguishable from the women who swab the floors of the FZ at night, in fact I think they’re the same. The men are all scoutmasters on display. You see more blondes in summer than in winter. All tanned and deeply unhealthy looking. An awful lot of bodies, precious few faces. Sports shirts, no skirts. Yesterday, my first day back, was ghastly. Immediate plummet of spirits, the way mercury can fall to zero. The feeling as though your genitals were gone, nothing left! Skirts, where there are skirts, all buttoned up, crooked gait of the men, as though they were originally designed as quadrupeds. (no. 134)
This account matches the sarcastic horror paintings of Otto Dix. Roth tried — further driven on by the plight of Friedl, who required treatment, and finally hospitalization — to save himself in fiction. He put out a book a year: Flight Without End in 1927, Zipper and His Father in 1928, Right and Left in 1929. (After 1933, it was to be more like two books a year: a completely ruinous and impossible production.) The rejection by S. Fischer of The Silent Prophet and his own abandonment of Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois checked his progress. When the firm of Gustav Kiepenheuer took him on, and Job, subtitled The Story of a Simple Man came out to excellent reviews and — for the first time — appreciable sales in 1930, it looked as though — after seven novels! — Roth might be poised for a new career as a novelist, and he quite deliberately set himself (bought himself time and space, and as much peace of mind as a monthly stipend could buy) to write the “book of old Austria” that was to be his masterpiece, The Radetzky March. It was serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung (among his last gifts to the paper), and published in August 1932—nicely in time to be fed to the flames by enthusiastic National Socialist students in Berlin on 10 May 1933.
14. To Benno Reifenberg
Paris, 16 May 1925
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,1
I fear this letter may give you the impression that I am so besotted with Paris, and with France, that I have lost the balance of my mind. Be assured, therefore, that I am writing to you in full possession of my skeptical faculties, with all my wits about me, and running the risk of making a fool of myself, which is just about the worst thing that could happen to me. I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here. Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European. Paris is free, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in the most majestic pathos. Any chauffeur is wittier than our wittiest authors. We really are an unhappy bunch. Here everyone smiles at me, I fall in love with all the women, even the oldest of them, to the point of contemplating matrimony. I could weep when I cross the Seine bridges, for the first time in my life I am shattered by the aspect of buildings and streets, I feel at ease with everyone, though we continually misunderstand each other in matters of practicalities, merely because we so delightfully understand each other in matters of nuance. Were I a French author, I wouldn’t bother printing anything, I would just read and speak. The cattle drovers with whom I eat breakfast are so cultivated and noble as to put our ministers of state to shame, patriotism is justified (but only here!), nationalism is an expression of a European conscience, any poster is a poem, the announcements in a magistrate’s court are as sublime as our best prose, film placards contain more imagination and psychology than our contemporary novels, soldiers are whimsical children, policemen amusing editorialists. There is — quite literally — a party against Hindenburg2 being celebrated here at the moment, “Guignol contre Hindenburg” but then the whole city is a protest against Hindenburg anyway, against Hindenburg, Prussia, boots, and buttons. The Germans here, the North Germans, are full of rage against the city, and they are blind and insensitive to it. For instance, I quarreled with Palitzsch,3 who is of the better sort of North German and who can only understand my enthusiasm as a sort of poetic spleen, and thereby excuses it. He makes allowances for me! Me, a poet! That much vaunted North German “objectivity” is a mask for his lack of instinct, for his nose that isn’t an organ of sense but a catarrh dispenser. My so-called subjectivity is in the highest degree objective. I can smell things he won’t be able to see for another ten years.